Measuring Soil Respiration
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Yesterday we reported on how Agrology is assessing soil health by measuring soil respiration. But getting an accurate reading on the amount of carbon dioxide coming off the soil sounds like it could be cumbersome and expensive for growers. Agrology CEO Adam Koeppel says they’ve found a way to make an old method more automated.
Koeppel… “We're using an approach called soil chambers, which been done for about a hundred years. And we've just figured out how to make it digital and automated, and all the stuff that makes it a really usable tool for a farmer. And it's kind of like a digital soil moisture sensor. You know, previously you'd have to go out and you could, you know, dig a hole and squeeze the dirt and see how moist it was. But having a bunch of digital soil moisture meters around sending data is pretty great too. Because now you can look at everything at once and you don't have to go out and dig all those holes. And so our sensor works kind of like that. But it's also combined with a bunch of machine learning. Because it turns out that measuring the carbon dioxide coming outta the soil, that respiration, is a little more complex than just getting a soil moisture number. We have to take a bunch of different data sources from a lot of different sensors. And process it through the machine learning that we've built to deliver the kind of insights that are helpful for farmers.”
Learn more at Agrology.ag.
